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4 August 1998
Source: Hardcopy The New York Review of Books, August 13, 1998, p.
61.

Thank you for your June 17, 1998, letter regarding the National Transportation
Safety Board's ongoing investigation of the accident involving TWA flight
800. In your letter, you stated that you were interested in hearing about
Safety Board research on the possible role of High Intensity Radiated Fields
(HIRFs) in the TWA flight 800 accident. I wanted to take this opportunity
to update you on the Safety Board's efforts.

The Safety Board is working with the Joint Spectrum
Center (JSC) in Annapolis, Maryland, to conduct a study of the electrical
field strength, which may have existed in the airspace around TWA flight
800 when the accident occurred. The JSC maintains extensive files on the
capabilities and characteristics of military aircraft, vessels, and ground-based
transmitters. It has investigated the possible role of electromagnetic
interference in aircraft accidents in the past. Its analysts provided exceptional
expertise in this area during the investigation of the crash of a US Air
Force CT-43A (Boeing 737) in Dubrovnik, Croatia, which killed Commerce Secretary
Ron Brown. The JSC will provide Safety Board investigators with classified
information regarding military emitters, as well as military reports on
electromagnetic interference (EMI), including reports generated by Colonel
Charles Quisenberry that you mentioned in your article in The New York
Review. Although the Safety Board will consider all of this information
in its analysis of the TWA flight 800 accident, some of the details of military
emitters are classified and cannot be divulged to the public.

The Safety Board is also discussing EMI/HIRF research with researchers at
the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
Langley Research Center. Researchers
there have conducted flight tests with a Boeing 757 and have taken measurements
of the electromagnetic environment inside the aircraft in the presence of
HIRF from known antenna sites. The Safety Board is evaluating with the NASA
staff ways in which their work can provide information on the electromagnetic
environment that may have existed inside TWA flight 800.

I appreciate your continued interest and comments regarding this aspect of
our investigation.

Sincerely,

Jim Hall

July 16, 1998

Dear Chairman Hall:

Thank you for your July 8, 1998, letter which describes the most recent stage
of the Safety Board's research into the possible role of High Intensity Radiated
Fields in the TWA 800 accident.

You state three major pieces of information. Each of the three is extremely
heartening to me and (I would think) to anyone concerned about High Intensity
Radiated Fields. The first is that the Joint Spectrum Center will attempt
to assess the electrical field strength of the airspace around TWA 800. The
second is that you will be engaged in discussion with NASA. The third is
that the 1988 Air Force Study into the effects of radio waves on military
craft--headed by Colonel Quisenberry--is now being made available to the
National Transportation Safety Board.

The expertise of the Joint Spectrum Center on the phenomenon of HIRFs must
surely be high. Eliminating the problem of electromagnetic interference is
the very task for which that agency was brought into being. Formerly called
the Electromagnetic Compatibility Analysis Center, the agency is centrally
responsible for ensuring compatibility of electromagnetic signals not only
across the various branches of the military but between the military and
civilian realms. Included among its functions is (according to the limited
printed information available to me) the specific task of making certain
that a scheduled military exercise does not conflict with, or in any way
imperil, civil society.

Naturally an observer must have some question about the Joint Spectrum Center's
own position as both investigator and partial subject since, as noted above,
it bears partial responsibility for anticipating the electromagnetic
complications of military exercises. (In saying this, I do not call into
question the integrity of the Joint Spectrum Center, but simply acknowledge
the longstanding legal principle that separates the subject of an inquiry
from the agents carrying it out.) Nevertheless, I assume that the NTSB and
the JSC have evaluated this potential conflict of interest and have devised
a way of circumventing it.

Your revelation that NASA, as well as the Joint Spectrum Center, will be
assisting you in determining the electromagnetic environment outside and
inside the plane is also very reassuring, especially since their work (the
1994 NASA study by Martin Shooman of the effect of HIRFs on civilian planes;
the present research you cite on Boeing 757s) places them in the position
of having intricate information about outcomes that occur in actual flight.

Although both laboratory data and actual field data will make crucial
contributions to our understanding, the inadequacy of the first to predict
the second has repeatedly been stressed in the scientific and military
literature. A leading Air Force scientist,
Carl Baum (quoted
in my article at length on pages 64-65 of the April 9 New York Review),
refers to the laboratory test as an "electromagnetic hammer" that in its
crudity cannot adequately reveal the complexity of what happens in real flight.
This point is also stressed by pilots who are quoted in the public record
as saying they are put in jeopardy by flying through airspace whose
electromagnetic complexity has not been duplicated in the laboratory. Both
NASA and the Joint Spectrum Center should be able to bring forward concrete
information about the actual environment.

One key source--to me the most potentially important of all--has so far not
been included in your description of the research now being undertaken: the
men and women who were on the ten or more military craft in the area. Nothing
can substitute for the information they can provide, especially in view of
the important part-- noted above--of realistic physical evidence in analyzing
the complexities of electromagnetic interaction. The eyes and ears of the
country's defense are greatly assisted by the powerful radars and sonars;
but our final security resides in the observations of living persons. Over
the past two years, press accounts of the accident have remarked on the absence
of information about the accident from the country's powerful (and astonishingly
expensive) ground, ship, air, and satellite monitors. But, so far as we have
been told, the most acute and trustworthy sensing equipment of all has not
been consulted. If the men and women who were present on the various aircraft,
ships, and military installations in the area have been invited to give concrete,
minute-by-minute information about the precise equipment that was turned
on^and turned off, the public has not been informed about it.

I understand that reasons of state can sometimes mean that information must
be withheld. But surely the fall of a civilian aircraft resulting in 230
deaths presents us with a reason of state of the highest order. Without concrete
information from the men and women who were present, I cannot understand
how the NTSB, JSC, and NASA can evaluate the precise electromagnetic environment;
and without that evaluation, there is no way to know whether or not High
Intensity Radiated Fields caused the catastrophe.

If I may make a suggestion. it would be that there should be--if there is
not already--a person or persons inside the Safety Board specifically designated
to assess High Intensity Radiated Fields as a potential cause. It is of course
crucial that other experts would subject any seemingly positive evidence
about HIRFs to rigorous testing. But just as the positive arguments and evidence
need to be tested, so, too, do the negative arguments and evidence. Having
both positive and negative views represented would increase the chance that
the truth will eventually be arrived at, whatever that truth may be. If you
have not already done so, I hope you might consider inviting into the formal
inquiry some of the scientists or military persons (in addition to members
of the JSC) who have dealt directly with HIRF inquiries, such as Colonel
Charles Quisenberry, whose Air Force study is now in your possession, and
Martin Shooman, whose research for NASA on civilian planes gives us important
information on this subject.

I appreciate your generosity in taking time to write to me and am honored
to be in conversation with you.